Looking down from the cliffs of Erice onto the sea and lowlands below.

Today, we ventured out from Palermo, driving several hours along the coastal highway, rising above the azure blue sea, to reach the ancient town of Erice. We walked through the medieval stone streets to find the gem of the town--the Pasticceria Maria Grammatico. Legendary throughout Sicily for her exquisite sweet creations, she gained international fame when the well-known American author, Mary Taylor Simeti, wrote a book about Maria's profound life story in Bitter Almonds: Recollections from a Sicilian Girlhood.

Maria Grammatico was orphaned and raised in a convent, where she apprenticed under the nuns who taught her the ancient secrets of convent pastry creations for 15 years. She left the convent and opened up her pastry shop in Erice, which preserved these important baking techniques and shared them with the visitors who come to her pasticceria from all over the world daily. (While we were filming over a period of a few hours, there were groups from France, Germany, England, Scotland, America, and Japan).

Maria and Fabrizia are good friends, allies in the quest to preserve Sicilian culinary traditions, and Maria generously offered to make La Frutta di Martorana for our film. One of the traditional sweets for La Festa di Morti, La Frutta di Martorana were invented in Sicily in the 12th century by nuns in the Convent of Martorana, and were designed to please the Norman King, Roger II. Made out of marzipan from Sicilian almonds, they are are decorated with fine brushes to resemble Sicilian fruits. In places like Maria Grammatico's pasticceria, they are an art form. She makes dozens of types of fruit and vegetables.

We filmed Maria making the fruit from beginning to end--from the grinding of the almonds to the final decorations with plates of food dye and brushes. She kneads and shapes the marzipan with the grace of someone who has been sculpting them for decades. She uses wooden molds and tools to form them with precision, but the act is so second nature to her that she tells us stories while she works, in her musical voice. At the other end of the kitchen, a male pastry chef puts the dots on the fichi d'india, the prickly pear fruits that are commonly eaten in Sicily.

Saint Frances is one of the many pieces of religious iconography that decorates Maria's kitchen/ San Francesco nella cucina di Maria.

Though we would have happily stayed in her warm kitchen for the rest of the day, after filming the demonstration and the interview with her about the history of this dish and her memories of La Festa di Morti, we packed up our equipment and headed out of Erice to the country house of Mary Taylor Simeti, the American author who has not only written about Maria, but also about a myriad of Sicilian characters and customs. To many Americans and English-speaking people, she is the literary window into Sicily. My grandparents, for example, instantly recommended her most famous book, On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal,the moment they found out I was going to spend here. She has lived on the island since she was 22 in the 1960s, marrying a Sicilian man and raising her children here. She has spent the decades researching Sicilian culture and is a treasure trove of information on Sicilian festivals, as well as an interesting person to interview for the film for an "outsider's" perspective on the traditions.

We decided to do the interview in English, to give our viewers a break from reading subtitles, though she speak impeccable Italian. Because she is such an excellent resource, we took the time to ask her about many of the festivals, not just La Festa di Morti. She entertained us (and hopefully you, future viewer) with stories of past festivals and theories on the origins and meaning behind many of the festivals. A humorous moment during the interview (that will sadly not make it into the final film) was when Giacomo and I realized that in the window behind Mary, a little boy was poking his face against the glass, with a miserable looking cat dangling awkwardly in his arms. He obviously thought our film needed some more excitement!

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ABOUT US

This film project is produced by the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School in the heart of Sicily. We hope to chronicle the many saint festivals in Sicily and how they support slow food cultures on the island. We anticipate that it will hit film festivals and be available for sale in 2015. This website and blog are to chronicle our progress for our financial supporters, followers, and friends.